turtledovefandomcom-20200216-history
Talk:Ion Antonescu
Here you go, TF--an Eastern European strongman who isn't a Catholic. TR 18:06, September 12, 2009 (UTC) ::I was about to comment on that myself. Thanks, TR. I was also wondering if the scientific definition of "ion" was well known enough for me to make a viable attempt at wordplay. Turtle Fan 21:52, September 12, 2009 (UTC) :What about Stalin, or rather almost all rulers of the Russian and Soviet empires? Jelay14 ::There are them, but I had noticed that just about all the tinpot dictators HW was leading us to create were going straight into the Catholics category. Now they weren't all evil, necessarily, but I was starting to think that they're not the people I'm proudest to have as representatives. Turtle Fan 21:52, September 12, 2009 (UTC) Born in 1882--outside odds that he'd have lived till 1965 if nature and fate were left to take their course, but not impossible--Franco made it to 83, and held onto power till the end. Synghman Rhee was 84 when he was toppled in a coup and died at 90. Horthy died at 88, as did Tito, who remained in power till his death. According to HT, anyway, had Tojo not been executed he could have lived and retained the Prime Ministry till at least 82. I find the former rather more believable than the latter. Kim Il-Sung managed to make it to that age with both life and power in OTL, though. I bring this up because I was wondering: When it became clear the Nazis would lose WWII he tried to arrange a seperate peace. Romania tried to to do the same thing when it became clear the Worldwar Nazis would lose their second war against the Race. I was wondering if from that we could extrapolate that he was the leader in that war. Turtle Fan 20:14, December 17, 2009 (UTC) :It might be evidence of his being alive, but I wouldn't extrapolate based solely on that point alone. HT did let the WW 2 era leaders die. Tojo was the only one alive and kicking that we know of for sure. Hitler died, Stalin died, Himmler died, etc. ::Don't forget Molotov! HB specifically mentions that he was the last of the old guard to go. You also still had Mao and Chiang both around at the end of Col, and I believe Diderot too. Not sure what that suggests. Turtle Fan 23:26, December 17, 2009 (UTC) :It certainly wouldn't have taken an Antonescu to figure out that attacking the Race was of no benefit to Romania. We don't have sufficient evidence, either way. TR 22:29, December 17, 2009 (UTC) ::If only Gizzi were here. Turtle Fan 23:26, December 17, 2009 (UTC) On another note, the fact that Antonescu, whom Hitler loved so well, seized power in Romania earlier than OTL (assuming we want to retcon for HT and not just complain about his sloppiness) could account for why the rest of the former Little Entente gave not a shit about Czechoslovakia's fall. Turtle Fan 23:26, December 17, 2009 (UTC) :That could explain it. I guess one of the few benefits of HT's decision to be sketchy about the politics of that TL is that it is very easy to plausibly retcon to fix errors. TR 17:30, December 18, 2009 (UTC) ::It would be. I don't mind playing around with suggestions like this, but I absolutely loathe the idea of doing the work of constructing such a story when HT was too lazy to do so himself. ::Lazy. . . . You know what Hitler's War reminds me of? When you had to write a term paper for a class but didn't have anything substantive to say, so you just babbled on and on about some superficial ideas you'd pulled out of your ass. Turtle Fan 21:02, December 18, 2009 (UTC) Reviewing the history, I still don't know whether HT meant for Antonescu to be in power early or not. A big factor in Antonescu's rise was the push-pull between Stalin and Hitler's repective demands. The other was the fact that France wasn't going to come running. We have the second, but the first isn't quite there. Stalin may have made demands, but he's certainly not acting on them at the end of HW, and is concentrating on Poland instead. Germany doesn't seem to give a shit about Romania one way or the other. So why is he Marshal Antonescu, and why does anyone outside of Romania care? TR 17:36, April 28, 2010 (UTC) :I really do think it's laziness on Turtledove's part. He needed to name the Romanian leader for that one line, remembered that Antonescu was in power at the same point on the OTL war timeline, and assumed he'd been in a year earlier as well. Turtle Fan 19:24, April 28, 2010 (UTC)